Make noise!

It will soon be two months since the devastating earthquake destroyed Port au Prince and other parts of Haiti.

No other nation in the past two hundred years has endured – and is still enduring – so much. A million plus Haitians are still without the barest necessaries of life: adequate food, drinking water and shelter. Sanitation is still primitive and completely inadequate. Some 500,000 tents or plastic tarps have been distributed, but that still leaves numberless people sleeping under thin sheets and in the mud when it rains.

Conditions will soon worsen. The rainy reason is fast approaching. Homeless Haitians must be moved to higher ground soon, or disease, misery, and death will afflict more and more of them. Immediate and dramatic action is essential. There is no time for politics and bureaucratic turf wars. If land must be appropriated to accomplish the task, some authority needs to cut through legal niceties. Landowners’ rights must stand aside; the rights of the masses who desperately need a place to go take precedence. We are talking about people’s lives after all. Now! The clock is ticking, the hands are moving.

Most newspapers and TV stations have moved on. Other concerns have superseded Haiti’s earthquake – the politics of health care, the earthquake in Chile, the storms in this country, our seemingly endless winter. . . , the list goes on. But the job in Haiti is not done. We’ve got to maintain the focus. How do we keep helping the Haitian people?

Make noise!

Write, call, FAX, or email
President Barack Obama
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500
(include your e-mail address)
202-456-1414
FAX: 202-456-2461
www.whitehouse.gov/contact

Write, call, FAX, or email
U.S. Senator Lamar Alexander
455 Dirksen Senate Office Building
Washington, DC 20510
Phone: (202) 224-4944
Fax: (202) 228-3398
http://alexander.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?p=Email

Write, call, FAX, or email
U.S. Senator Bob Corker
185 Dirksen Senate Office Building
Washington, D.C., 20510
202-224-3344
FAX 202-228-0566
http://corker.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?p=ContactMe

Write, call, FAX, or email
U.S. Representative Bart Gordon
2306 Rayburn HOB
Washington, D.C. 20515
Phone: (202) 225-4231
Fax: (202) 225-6887
http://gordon.house.gov/contact/contact_form.shtml

If your representative is someone else, Google them for their contact information.

Write a letter to the editor of your local newspaper, or all newspapers in your region.

Please take the time, now. And ask (nag, cajole, prod, motivate) your family, friends and business associates to write. The more noise, the better the chance of action.